Sunday, June 23. 2013

It was a day of downs and ups in the steam shop.The order is significant,despite a couple of early set-backs it became
a very successful day.I had to leave mid-afternoon
for an evening event downtown.The major
progress was achieved in the evening ..... hmm, there may be a connection there
!!.

We keep pushing
forward on 1630.

·When we arrived in the
morning, Dennis had completed the required welding during the week but no more
rivets had been placed.It turned out
that a couple of the mid-week team had been sick or unavailable so no riveting
was possible on Wednesday.

·In addition Kevin
had been in during the week and made great progress on needle chipping the
front of the locomotive ready for repainting.In addition he had done a lot of cleaning in the shop.This is a major part of work in the steam shop.A lot of what we do creates dust and, without
periodic cleaning, the place gets into a real mess.

·We are now getting
close to the first tests with water in the boiler to check the sealing of all
the tubes that we have fitted.So
various jobs were scheduled to prepare for this.One big requirement is obviously water, which
we need to supply from the treatment plant in the steam lead and have available
for use in the shop.For this we use the
tankage of our milk car.

Jim
West, who was conductor of the day, managed to schedule things so that the car
was switched over to the steam lead by the service locomotive before the first
train.Thanks Jim.

Thereafter
things went downhill !.We initially had
problems with leakage from the inspection cover of the pump in the boxcar.Good thing it was near 90 degrees as a number
of us had unexpected showers.Then,
having overcome this and linked the milk car to the supply, we discovered that
two key valves in the milk car were split.It seems that the car was not completely drained last Fall and the
valves froze.Good thing we started this
a little ahead of when we absolutely need the water for testing.

During
the day Jeff removed the damaged valves from the car so that replacements can
be ordered for fitting next weekend.Stu
and Jeff worked on the water treatment plant so that the softener, which was
out of commission due to a leak, is now working again and properly sealed the
inspection cover on the pump to avoid further showers.

·Rick, Paul and
others worked on the smokebox front, cleaning this up and preparing the gasket.

Paul cleans the mating face of the
smokebox face plate

·Eric continued work
on the super heater flues in the front tube sheet.He is ensuring that any excess ferrule is
removed and starting to flare the tube ends in preparation for beading the ends
once we have ensured that they are water tight.

·Several of us worked
on fitting the plates in the cab, on which the gauges are mounted, and then
fitting the boiler pressure gauges to these.The water level gauges were also fitted.All of these are needed for the initial hydro testing.It is really nice to see fittings coming back
into place on the back head, which has been bare for more than a year.

The pressure and
water gauges are now back on the fireman's side

Pressure and water gauges - Firemans
side

and on the
engineer's side as well.

Pressure and water gauges - Engineers
side

·Then, after I left,
the main event started.The three
remaining rivets were placed.THE
RIVETING IS COMPLETE.Some of them still
need to be caulked but the riveting itself is done.The next key job is to fit the two flexible
stays.The stays fit into the two open
sleeves that can be seen just above the rivets in the front face of the firebox
wrapper.

All rivets now in place

So another major milestone is achieved.The patch is now fully installed and we can
move forward to testing and reassembly.

I have a pretty interesting idea/question. Being 1630 always seems to use the milk tanker for extra water or to use as a water source why not rebuild the Kansas City Southern Tender that arrived a couple weeks back? Could make a great auxiliary tender for when she's out on the line or for testing purposes such as this. Just an idea.

Hyde,
Who knows for the future. The KCS tender is far from usable at present and would require a lot of work to make it serviceable.
Would 1630 and train look better with two tenders as opposed to an express car next to the loco ?. Matter of choice I think.
Nigel

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